Page 31 of The Price of Love
‘No, I . . . but you know I’m engaged.’
‘Yeah. So? It was only a kiss, not full penetration. You looked a bit sad, that was all, very fragile. I wanted to cheer you up. Sorry if it didn’t work.’
The weird thing was, I thought later as I lay back in the hot, rusty-coloured water, that ithadworked. In a kind of sideways, roundabout way. Y’see, despite my undeniably pert chest and my winning way with abon mot, I failed to believe that I had anything much going for me. All right, I was pretty enough in a Miss Average, wouldn’t-kick-it-out-of-bed kind of way. But Luke must meet a thousand girls like me in the course of the working day. Cal’s kiss had reassured me that therewassomething about me that men found appealing. I grinned to myself and submerged. The enormous freestanding, cast-iron bath was large enough to allow all of me under.
A tap at the door. ‘You all right?’
‘Yes, thanks.’
‘Do you want a cup of tea in there?’
A pause. ‘But I’m in the bath. Naked.’
‘Can’t you judiciously pile up some bubbles? I promise not to let my passion be inflamed.’
‘Oh, go on then.’
The door opened cautiously and Cal, pretending to screw his eyes shut, advanced across the floor with a cup held out vaguely in my direction. Since absolutely none of me was visible under the brown water, I chuckled.
‘For God’s sake open your eyes, man. I know you’re peeping anyway, because you avoided that ripped bit of carpet.’
‘Bugger.’ He handed me the cup and perched himself on the window seat looking down onto the garden, leg bent up under his chin. ‘I’m going to have to sell.’ His voice was almost inaudible under the sloshing of the bathwater. ‘I’ve decided. I nearly fell down those bloody stairs, and with the uneven floors, it’s just not possible. I mean, it’s not the money, but what’s the point in keeping it?’
‘You could let it out. For holidays?’
‘Couldn’t bear owning it, but not living in it. This is home. I mean I spent a lot of time here, when I was younger, I . . . growing up, I . . .’ The words vanished into a shake of the head and he concentrated on looking out of the window very hard for a few moments. When he spoke again his voice was gruff with something he wouldn’t let me see. ‘Better off with a clean break.’
I swished water around with my hand, thinking. ‘I could buy it.’
‘Nah. You couldn’t.’
‘How much are you going to ask for it?’
‘Dunno. State it’s in, it’s not worth much, but there’s the land. Some clever developer could probably get permission to convert the barns, do up the house, three hundred K, probably.’
‘I could buy it.’ In my excitement, I nearly stood up.
‘What?’
‘I could. Oh, not quite yet, but . . .’ And then the story of my grandfather’s legacy came tumbling out, mixed-up words and confused sentence structure, but he got the point.
‘Wow. Four hundred and fifty thou. You could buy this place, do it up and still have change.’
‘And I want to. Honestly, Cal, not as a favour to you or anything, but I love it here. The atmosphere and the space, the fields. I can grow my herbs and maybe keep the goat. No, I’ll get a house cow, plenty of stabling for the kids’ ponies. Best of all, you can keep visiting. You needn’t feel that you’ve lost the place forever.’
‘You’ddothat?’ There was that bright intensity in his eyes again, that tight, concentrated look I’d seen outside.
‘Yes, of course. You could even keep your equipment out there in the barn if you wanted.’
A sharp glance. ‘Willow, it would be better if you forget you saw any of that, all right?’
I made a hurt face. ‘Why? What were you doing, calling the mothership?’
Cal shook his head again slowly, but all he said was, ‘Are you done in that bath yet? I’m beginning to disintegrate here,’ and left the room, leaving me with the similarly coloured cooling tea and bathwater.
Chapter Fifteen
I didn’t tell Luke about the kiss. Hell, I didn’t even tellKatie. Although I did give Katie and Jazz a highly comically embellished version of events regarding the goat and a hush-hush outline of my plan to buy the white house once my money came through. The kiss was too casual to mention and might have given rise to some awkward questioning, so I simply pretended it hadn’t happened and everything carried on as before. Luke and I continued to date, Flint continued to plague me with wafting around the house and laying maps on every flat surface and Ash continued not to return from Europe.
